Team DEEP

Coordinators: Delphine Grynberg & Henrique Sequeira

The DEEP’s team leads a global project aiming to constitute a competence center in Affective Sciences. To this end, the team resources are focused on the analysis and dynamics of emotional processes regulation, strongly associated to several pathologies and health challenges. The research program, subtended by several advanced multilevel techniques, allows a wide spectrum of emotional information analysis, from the brain control to complex social interactions. The DEEP’s approach aims to develop new and efficient therapeutic procedures both at individual and family levels.   

Methods: brain recordings (EEG, ERPs, Oscillations, MEG); autonomic recordings (facial thermal variations, electrodermal activity, heart rate and variability, respiratory and pupillary variations); behavioral measures (eye movements, quantitative narrative analysis, psychometric assessments, video-behavioral analysis).

Populations: healthy adults or having sub-clinical symptoms and patients with mental, somatic or neurological illnesses.  

The study of the affective dimensions of behaviour has acquired a new status with the advent of affective neuroscience. These have integrated the psychological questions associated with the most sophisticated spatial and temporal resolution techniques and now obtain major results concerning the cerebral mapping of emotions, the bodily impact of emotions and their regulation. Within this framework, our research priorities will focus on:

1/ the emotional salience conveyed by several sensory channels, its impact at cerebral, physiological and behavioral levels and its modulation by psychological traits;

2/ the regulation of emotional responses on the basis of individual traits, cognitive components and contextual elements and how these regulatory skills are acquired;

3/ the prediction of affective behaviours, in particular those related to the development of social cognition skills (reading intentions between partners, mental understanding and emotional states);

4/ the understanding of emotional processes to account for their disturbances in mental pathologies and personality disorders or in adapting to stress/crisis situations such as the announcement of somatic illnesses or the onset of chronic illnesses.

In short, the aim of the team is to determine, through an integrated multi-level approach (cognitive, behavioural and physiological), the privileged or even priority nature of the affective components in the management of cerebral and cognitive resources and in determining behaviour. In this context, the development of emotional skills and emotional regulation capacities are clearly identified as central and trans-nosographic elements to protect against the risk of setting up or maintaining mental or somatic pathologies to achieve a satisfactory level of well-being. The aim is therefore to understand these mechanisms in order to propose educational and psychological interventions to develop such skills or to protect them in crisis situations.